Chapter 102: With Heads Bowed

The light was dim, the white fluorescent strips flickering faintly.

A broken section of iron frame stubbornly hung suspended from it, swaying precariously in midair.

A drop of scarlet fluid slowly gathered on the ceiling, stretching, elongating, gradually thinning into an impossibly long thread. Finally, the thread could no longer bear the weight and snapped. The droplet fell from above, landing on the pad of a slender finger. The delicate skin whorls on that fingertip were smeared and covered by the scarlet fluid, and an ink-black snake tattoo coiled around the droplet’s edges, looking eager to taste it.

It was Jiang Zhique.

She rubbed her fingertips together slightly and discovered small hard clots within the fluid; a little pressure was enough to crush them.

She reached out and pushed open the stairwell door. What greeted her was still the wall smeared with dark red, upon which a twisted number was starkly visible.

One.

“Back here again,” she murmured.

This stairwell was very strange. When she climbed up, no matter how many flights she ascended, pushing the door open always revealed the first floor. She had also tried going down, but the result was identical. No matter what she tried, when she pushed the door open, she was always met with that same wall splattered with dark red.

Ghost Wall, that much was obvious. Thinking of this, she felt a pang of regret. Why hadn’t she purchased some Tang Family items beforehand? If she had a Tang Family Coiled Incense on her right now, or a Barrier-Breaking Incense, she wouldn’t be in such an embarrassing situation. But there was no helping it. Things had happened too quickly, like a turbulent wave crashing one after another. She and Qi Ran had no room to breathe at all, forced to stumble and crawl forward, pushed along by events.

She walked out of the stairwell, passed through the wrecked lobby and the van billowing thick black smoke on the verge of being totaled, intending to try the stairwell on the other side.

She moved as silently as possible. The carnage in the corridor was truly unsettling. The walls were broken, occasionally riddled with bullet holes, and bloodstains were sprayed with abandon across the floor, walls, and even the ceiling. Strangely, there was not a single corpse. The dead silence evoked a bone-chilling cold from deep within.

The lights in the corridor on the other side of the lobby had completely failed. She had to turn on her cell phone’s flashlight. The phone, now without signal, had only one remaining use: illumination. The beam of light pierced the cold shadows, lighting up the corridor floor mostly smeared with blood and filth.

She slowly walked forward. When she was roughly halfway down the corridor, a gaunt, bony hand silently descended from the upper right, outside the flashlight’s beam. Its target was unmistakably Jiang Zhique’s neck, which looked so fragile it seemed it would snap with a little force.

That emaciated arm had a bluish-purple tinge, like a corpse crawling out of hell. It successfully seized its target, clamping tightly around the back of Jiang Zhique’s neck. But before it could tighten and lock down, a hoarse, agonized scream suddenly rang out from above, cut short as dead silence instantly returned. Jiang Zhique reached out, pried the arm—now devoured down to only half its length—from her shoulder, and tossed it upward. A black shadow flashed and disappeared, swallowing the remaining half of the arm into its belly.

The pitch-black giant python, perfectly blended into the shadows, slithered across the ceiling, ignoring gravity’s hold.

Jiang Zhique looked up at the black python and stretched out her hand. “Help me,” she whispered. “Find the rest of them. Please.”

On her slender index finger, only a single, solitary snake tattoo remained. She had released one of the snake tattoos the moment she drove the car into the building.

Upon hearing the command, the giant python made no reaction. It merely watched her silently, its cold vertical pupils revealing no emotion whatsoever.

Having her command ignored didn’t discourage Jiang Zhique. She had long grown accustomed to the snake tattoos’ attitude toward her. These two temperamental snake markings were merely lodged within her body, nothing more. They never obeyed her arrangements. Every time she summoned a snake tattoo, there was a subsequent cost, sometimes significant, sometimes minor. Sometimes the price was the skin on the back of her hand, sometimes it was four or five days of deep sleep…

Beyond these immediately obvious costs, Jiang Zhique also had an unsettling feeling. A feeling that the true price she was paying was far greater than what appeared on the surface.

For a very long time, she had been having the same strange dream. In the dream, she became one of the entities within the snake tattoo, attached to the wrist of the next Snake Mark Bearer. When she woke up, residual hallucinations would linger. She would feel that having four limbs was strange, that her skin was too dry, and being soaked in water brought much relief… This feeling made her deeply uneasy, like she was lucidly sensing herself sliding toward an abyss, yet nothing she did could slow that inevitable descent.

She had never spoken of this to anyone, not to Li Siwen, nor to Qi Ran.

Because it meant she couldn’t control the snake tattoos, and the snake tattoos were her sole reason for existing.

Deceiving her companions sounded like a terrible thing to do. She tugged at the corner of her mouth slightly, her mood somewhat somber. Where exactly was Qi Ran? Had she died in that explosion? After the explosion, the bug had completely failed. She didn’t know if Qi Ran had perished in the blast, or if she had simply been abandoned, or if the bug had been shut off.

Her expression somewhat gloomy, she walked down the corridor, holding her cell phone as a flashlight. The pitch-black giant python followed directly above her, like a shadow.

(——————)

“Beep, beep, beep, beep…”

The scarlet alarm light flashed incessantly, rhythmically illuminating the pitch-black corridor of Sublevel Three, dyeing the entire hallway a dark crimson. Unlike the disastrous state of the other floors, Sublevel Three was perfectly intact. It was hard for it not to be intact, for whether it was the walls, the floor, or the ceiling, everything within sight was cold steel. These high-strength aluminum alloys armored Sublevel Three completely. The decoration was minimalist to the extreme, exuding a chilling, austere atmosphere.

“Please be quiet,” the black shadow said softly.

It was a woman’s voice, gentle in tone, sounding utterly incongruous with the environment. The content was equally out of place; she was making a request to a cold, mechanical alarm system. It sounded somewhat ridiculous.

But the piercing alarm sound truly stopped abruptly.

The black shadow slowly walked forward. She stretched out her right hand, fingertips gently brushing the wall, tracing past the tightly shut doors. Her movements were unhurried and relaxed, not at all like an invading robber, but more like a mistress strolling through her own house, reminiscing about past times. And she indeed displayed the bearing of a master. The infrared detectors and ripple transmitters that should have been present in the corridor were all blind, as if they didn’t exist. The autocannons mounted above the corridor, controlled by automatic fire-control systems, shut down one after another, their barrels drooping straight down like pilgrims bowing in worship.

“Rise,” the black shadow said softly, extending her hand.

Of course, no one heeded her words. More accurately, no machine heeded her words.

She held the pose for a moment, then, as if only now realizing these machines wouldn’t listen to her, slowly withdrew her hand.

She continued forward, reaching the end of the corridor, and stopped before the transitional door. She placed her hand upon it and gently pushed. The door, which required a password input to unlock, swung open obediently and tamely. The black shadow was just about to step inside when her movement abruptly halted.

“I guessed at what the intruder might look like. Considered many possibilities. But seeing it for real, I have to admit, it truly caught me off guard.”

Yue Yunqiu spoke calmly. He snapped open a chem-light stick and tossed it, letting it roll across the floor. The light illuminated the corridor and the space behind him on three sides: left, right, and rear. There stood three colossal mirrors, three meters tall and three meters wide, reflecting him and the black shadow from three different angles.

It was a woman who looked intellectual and gently poised, wearing a suit jacket, a blouse, and a midi skirt. She looked like she shouldn’t be here, but rather at a school, a library, or some art exhibition.

Yue Yunqiu recalled the name from the dossier. A single character: Xiao.

The distance between them was about fifteen meters. To be frank, this wasn’t a safe distance, but Yue Yunqiu’s tone wasn’t that of a guard addressing an intruder. It was more like casual small talk.

“I have to say, I’m truly curious. Are you the actual Ghost Birth Infant from back then, or someone who took the Ghost Birth Infant’s name?” Yue Yunqiu asked with keen interest. “I’ve never heard that the Ghost Birth Infant could disable electronic instruments. Or have you learned to keep up with the times, awakened some kind of cyber-soul in those machines? This is far too interesting. If that’s truly the case, you don’t need to bother with all this messy business. I can help you report it to the higher-ups. With you around, why bother researching controlled nuclear fusion? You could just ascend directly to become the Machine God. A utopia with infinite energy would be just around the corner.”

He spoke jokingly, but his body didn’t relax in the slightest. His gaze remained firmly fixed on the woman. The short dagger he held in a reverse grip was concealed beneath his sleeve. The dagger appeared to be made of bronze. It wasn’t sharp; the blade was covered in rust marks.